Cloudways – A Managed Hosting For Craft CMS 

Before you embark on developing a new website or upgrading your current site, it is worth researching which CMS is most suitable. Do you go with the familiar or are you ready to try something new? Choosing the right CMS is no easy decision, but there are plenty of web frameworks to consider in your quest for a great professional website. 

Of these options, WordPress is quick to spring to mind for numerous reasons, including its popularity, Olympic sized pool of plugins, and top notch free to premium themes. But make sure to evaluate alternative CMS that will also deliver a complete blogging and website building experience. In this article, we will be exploring an alternative CMS which is simple to install on your server and on Cloudways. 

Craft CMS is a flexible and user-friendly Content Management System for creating custom digital experiences. The interface is simple and easy to use but will require PHP and a MySQL database to operate. But If you’re on Cloudways, don’t worry! You’re already in the right place and it will take a few minutes to set up the environment.

Installation Process on Cloud: 

This is one of the easiest procedures you’ll face ever in any sort of cloud environment. Cloudways emphasizes on the client’s ease while deploying this product in their environments, and so it barely takes a few minutes to complete the total installation process. First of all, you need to provide user credentials to access the site. If you are not logged in yet, you can easily sign up from here. 

After logging in, you’ll see the following page:

Then click the “Launch” button.

Select your application from Application Server Details. After selecting the server, you’ll find the following option where you’ll have to click the three dots(…) on the right side of the server name.

Input the PHP App and PHP Server in the managed app and managed server options respectively.

After that choose the server size and location according to your requirements.

Now click on “Add Application”. This will open up the following application page.

Scroll down slightly to find the Custom App button under the PHP section, and click it.

After finishing all of these, press the Launch Now button.

It will take a few minutes to complete this server initiation process.

You’ll now get the following message.

After that click on the Applications tab on top and you’ll get this. Click on the PHP App.

After clicking on  the left side, in Application Management, click on Application Settings.

You can now change the folder name as craftcms and hit the save button.

Now you have to go to the Servers tab and get into the PHP server.

Launch the SSH Terminal.

Login with master credentials to enter the following screen.

Move to the public_html folder (as outlined here) and start the installation by adding wget. 

Unzip the file by entering the following command

unzip craft-3.0.41.zip

After unzipping, open and access the .env file. Since this isn’t usually possible through the SSH terminal, download filezilla client (most recent version) which can provide your master credentials and put the port 22. You can then access the folders as below. From there, open the .env file.

Change DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD and DB_DATABASE as per MYSQL Access credentials.

From the platform, go to Application Settings and reset the folder permissions:

Navigate to the Applications to enter the link just under Application URL:

Add web/index.php/admin/install in the browser just after the link. If  the following screen pops up in front of you, the configuration has been executed successfully. Now click Install Craft.

After inputting all database information as per the .env file, it will direct you to to enter your own credentials. 

After providing your details, you’ll see this screen where you can create your site details.

After successfully installing Craft CMS, you will get a confirmation.

Then you’ll be directed to the admin dashboard.

If you see this, congratulations! Craft CMS has been successfully installed on your Cloudways server.

What To Expect from Craft CMS On Cloudways

Look at the Cloudways dashboard and you’ll see you can easily check Craft news and recent updates, and get help from experts as well as feedback. All of this combines to make Cloudways a unique cloud platform when compared to others.

Also, from the system report feed, you can get all information regarding versions of PHP, MySQL, Craft, Image Driver, Yii, twig and more.

You can scroll to see if all requirements are being fulfilled.

From PHP info, you can get details about all debugging elements and CLI.

In addition to this, there are a lot of features available to edit the settings of websites, routes, and users.

And don’t forget about the plugin stores filled with all sorts of plugins to fulfill your various needs. Also, you can explore craft cms plugins to get aware. 

All of these features are exclusively available in Cloudways. 

Why Cloudways?

There are a number of Craft CMS hosting providers in the market at this moment, so why Cloudways? Well, when it comes to choosing a cloud hosting provider, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach. Different businesses have different performance requirements and budget constraints that demand a choice of cloud providers.

So should you opt for Cloudways? 

Cloudways boasts fast speeds, great scalability, and a pricing system that lets you grow your business while sticking to your budget. Not only does it let you go live in a few minutes without any complexity, Cloudways also emphasizes server speed and efficiency better than its competitors. 

Cloud Providers: Cloudways offers five cloud providers:

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
2. Google Compute Engine (GCE)
3. DigitalOcean
4. Linode
5. Vultr

Users can launch a server on any of the five cloud providers as per their choices through the Cloudways Platformm and can benefit from unmatched performance from other service providers. This is possible due to the Cloudways custom-built stack that combines various advanced server and cache technologies.

Once the server has been launched, users can deploy as many apps as the server specifications (CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth) allow. In any case, the server specifications can be scaled up straight away from the platform.

And how can we forget about the 99.99% uptime inherent to all of these cloud providers? Yes, with almost 100% uptime, Cloudways make it really the best among other similar platforms.

Plans: Plans and pricing may vary from DigitalOcean – Starting at $10/month, Linode – Starting at $12/month, Vultr – Starting at $11/month. Google Compute Engine – Starting at $34.17/month and  Amazon Web Service – Starting at $36.04/month, and so on. 

Support for Popular Apps: Cloudways supports all PHP applications, from popular ones (such as WordPress and Magento) to emerging CMSs like Craft CMS. Popular applications are available in the initial server and application process. However, if your application of choice isn’t on the list, you have to simply launch a custom PHP application and then use the integrated Composer and support for Git to install your application.

24X7 Support: Cloudways also prioritizes strong customer support through several channels like email, support tickets, and live chat. Plus, it offers add-ons for users in Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) with shorter turnaround time and private support channels via Slack and phone.

Managed Application and Server Backups and Restore: The Cloudways Platform manages the backup processes, and offers both automated and on-demand backups. This allows users to either let the platform take care of the backup or back up an entire server or individual applications whenever they wish.The backup archives can be stored at an off-site location or locally on the same server as per your choices. The price of the backup is nominal and can be found in the real-time billing section.

SSH and SFTP Access: SSH and SFTP access is available (in our installation, we used Filezilla to edit .env file) so you can easily upload or download page/files from the server end in your local computer. 

Simplified Server Management: Instead of a command line, Cloudways offers an intuitive browser-based front-end panel that lets users easily take care of everything, from launching additional servers and applications to adding SSL certificates for their applications.

Managed Security: Security is built into the foundation of the platform, with firewalls that filter out malicious traffic before it can hit users’ applications. Similarly, all Cloudways Platform accounts are protected by Two-Factor Authentication (TFA) by default. Also users get immediate notifications about unrecognized login attempts to their accounts. Users can also install free or paid SSL certificates.

Cloudways Platform has a robust IP Whitelisting feature as well, where users can allow (or block) specific IP addresses to access their server.

Performance Monitoring:

Cloudways offers a native Monitoring feature that lets users easily check out the most essential metrics that determine application and server performance. By viewing simple and customizable graphs, you can get an instant and pretty accurate idea of what’s going on currently and what you need to fix in order to get the most out of your business websites.

Native Support for Git and Staging Environment:

Native support for Git is another premium feature of the Cloudways Platform. 

After clicking you’ll get the following page from where you need to generate an SSH key.

You can view SSH Key by clicking View SSH Key.

This SSH Key is downloadable. Consider keeping a copy in another safe place.

Login to github and go to the Settings option where you will find SSH and GPG Keys.

Then you have to input the SSH Key here by copying from Cloudway platform. After adding the key, it will look like this:

Copy that SSH address generated from your repository.

Then go back to the Cloudways console to input Git Remote Access url and branch (no need to input Deployment Path as it’s already public_html).

You will be notified after successful deployment.

Upon successful GitLab deployment of your application, you’ll get a green-colored pop-up message “Git cloned”. 

More About Cloudways

Cloudways is currently managing Craft CMS hosting in:

15 Countries

33 Cities

62 Data Centers

What Cloudways Customers Have to Say

Cloudways prioritizes customer satisfaction too, as can be seen from what its clients have to say. According to the Managing Director of Keen, Cloudways fulfils “the ability for a digital agency like us to have lots of servers, from different providers, depending on the need, in one place.”

The Founder of Incluyeme, Gabriel Marcolongo says: “We love being part of the Cloudways family! We encourage all startups to switch to Cloudways managed hosting platform for a hassle-free hosting experience.”

Letty Flatt, owner at Letty’s Kitchen says, “The support is excellent. I have needed their help and they always come through. I have no technical brain and the back end of my website is all confusing so I need the engineer’s help when something breaks.”

Jeff Weese, founder at Joslex Studios says, “We gave Cloudways a try and we saw our client sites have page load time decreased from an average of 5.4 seconds to just over 1 second.”

Final Words

To sum up, if you are a small or mid-sized business owner and want to grow your revenues and brand reach without worrying about the performance of your websites, Cloudways offers a great platform that effectively works as an in-house sysadmin for your business. Visit the Cloudways website to learn more about this yourself.